Teach Me Dirty (7 page)

“I like that. Your analogy makes perfect sense. I like the way you see things, Helen.”

“That’s because you see the same things.” The words came out unbidden. My eyes flitted to his for just a moment, and my cheeks burned. “An artist’s eye.”

“That, too, makes perfect sense, but I think it’s more than that.”

My little heart beat like a drum. “You do?”

He made to speak, his lips poised in expression, but the creak and clank of the door opening stopped him in his tracks. He stepped away from me, recoiling as though he shouldn’t be at my side, and the space felt like a chasm, the mood broken. A cleaner backed through the open door, uncurling a bin liner and shaking it until it billowed wide. It took her a moment to realise the room wasn’t empty.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll come back.”

“No need, we were just wrapping up.” His voice was back in teacher mode, self-assured and calm, without a hint of fluster. “Are you ready to go, Helen?”

I nodded, grabbed my palette to empty into the sink but he took it from my hands and gestured instead to my scattering of art supplies. He washed up my palette as I packed, and my heart wouldn’t stop thumping.

I’d missed a moment, and I knew it.

The cleaner emptied the bins, then began wiping down the surfaces, and Mr Roberts finished up at the sink and then grabbed his bag — a well-worn satchel like Lizzie’s minus the glitter. He waited in the doorway until I was done packing my things. I followed him out into the dim corridor, and further still, stepping through the main entrance and into the outside air. It was a bright but chilly afternoon, a gust of wind chasing leaves around my shoes, but it was nice. He took a few steps in the direction of his car, easy to see now that the car park was virtually empty.

I held up a hand as I set off in the opposite direction. “Thank you,” I said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Yes,” he said. “Good evening, Helen.”

He took his car keys from his pocket, and I heard them jangle as I walked away.

His voice caught me off guard. “Do you have anywhere to be?”

I turned on the spot. “Sorry?”

“Are you on a schedule? Do you need to be home?”

I shrugged, then realised how stupid a gesture that was. “I have dinner, at six… Mum’s cooking pork…” I smiled. “No, I don’t have anywhere to be. Not yet.”

He smiled back. “Then let me show you something else I find beautiful.”

***

Mark

I tried to convince myself that this was innocent, but I felt like a condemned man from the moment Helen slipped into the passenger seat. I daren’t drive through town, innocent or not, so I took the long route, weaving through a maze of country lanes only to circle wide and head back towards Deerton Heath and home turf. Helen didn’t ask where we were headed. She just stared through the window at the blur of hedgerows, fingers tapping her bare knees compulsively, nervously, a gentle smile on her lips.

A straggly drift of cloud cleared, and the late afternoon sun found the car. She relaxed into the seat, eyes narrowed against the glare, eyelashes fluttering. The light kissed her hair, and the brown wisps around her face turned auburn, glowing like embers. She dared a glance in my direction, and her eyes caught mine staring back. She looked away in a heartbeat, but her smile widened and a thrill ran through me. I had to drag my attention back to the road.

I steered the car off the beaten track, and we rumbled our way across the cattle grid, where the hedgerows turned wild, with trees that stretched overhead. When the track turned to nothing but grassy dirt, I pulled the car onto the verge, parking up in my usual spot. I unclipped my seat belt and Helen mirrored me, stepping out into the country air with a cute little bounce.

She looked almost out of place here. The starkness of school uniform, pleated skirt and black socks. A taboo alone in the countryside. Her enticing loveliness heightened by nature itself.

I gestured to the fence and she accompanied meekly, her steps light.

I made easy work of the fence. A leg up and over in a flash before I beckoned Helen to follow. She looked at me from the other side, then looked down at her bare legs and the precarious modesty the pleats of her skirt offered. I felt the twitch in my groin and savoured the sight of her. A beautiful thing.

“I’ve got you,” I encouraged, and my arms were already out for her, coaxing her across.

She stepped up onto the middle rung and swung a nervous foot over, pinching the top rail between her thighs. I wanted to believe that I was only interested in steadying her as my hands reached for her waist. I wanted to believe that my body pressed itself against hers purely to ensure she didn’t lose her footing on the dismount. I wanted to believe I didn’t take a breath of her soft hair and didn’t thrill at the way she smelled of apple shampoo and innocence. I wanted to believe I wasn’t getting hard.

Her feet landed with a gentle thump, setting her onto solid ground without a hitch, but I remained still, glued to the spot with Helen’s back against my chest.

“Thanks,” she said.

“Steady?” I asked, and the question was entirely redundant, an excuse to snake my hungry fingers further around her waist. Her flesh was firm, her belly just the slightest little curve under my splayed hand.

“Yeah, I’m good,” she said, and her tone was so soft, so oblivious.

I didn’t take my hands from her, not even when she turned in my arms. Her movement made it so easy for my fingers slip inside her blazer, tight against the small of her back with nothing but her flimsy school blouse separating skin from skin. She looked up at me, and I felt her shiver. She took a little breath, and her eyes were full of nerves, her cheeks flushed.

“I… um… this place is amazing, Mr Roberts…”

So innocent.

An innocent little girl with a sketchbook full of fantasies.

“We’re not there yet,” I said, and my voice had a tremor to it. “There’s a brook, amongst the trees. Just a little walk.”

“Great.” She flashed me a sweet smile and I couldn’t take my eyes from her perfect mouth. “I can’t wait.”

But she didn’t move, and neither did I.

Here, in this place, Mr Roberts the teacher was nowhere to be seen, here I was only Mr Roberts the man, and that man was wanting.

Wanting the clammy heat between Helen Palmer’s tender thighs, wanting the hard nubs of her nipples against my palms. Wanting her tight, young pussy, the feel of her tongue around my cock. Wanting to hear her gasp, and whimper, and come under my fingers, the way I’d listened to her come under hers.

Mr Roberts the man wanted to taste Helen Palmer’s dirty fantasies. Every single one of them. Every single part of her.

The girl was working her way inside my very soul, and her eyes showed not the slightest hint of calculated sorcery, nor the slightest hint of the tenacious little vixen Anna had warned me against. I could feel Helen Palmer in my bones, in my veins, her soft breaths ricocheting around my brain. Yet, she seemed to have not the slightest idea. Not the slightest clue.

Innocent. The girl was innocent.

Yet her sketches were anything but.

I closed my eyes to blank out her image, and then I forced Mr Roberts the teacher back to the fore. I took my hands away, and as I did her body moved with me, just a fraction, but enough to know that her flesh wanted mine.

“This way,” I said, already moving, trying to ignore my stiffening cock, concentrating on nothing but the landscape, breathing in the outdoors as though nature itself could cleanse my dirty soul.

Helen knew we’d reached our destination before I announced it, a visible haven amidst the farmland, an oasis of babbling water and rock, edged with mature trees. The brook dipped sharply in this spot, tumbling over the ledge to form a miniature waterfall, from which it danced across the shallows and the pebbles before snaking its way through the trees. This place was a suntrap, catching a perfect sliver of daylight before the sun dipped behind the hill. The trees whispered overhead, as though they were talking about us. About me. About the bulge in my trousers and my tenuous grip on morality.

My usual perch was waiting. A slab of slate, positioned like it had been designed for me, and had always been that way. It was perfectly flat on top and big enough for two, and once upon a time there
had
been two. I never sat in Anna’s space, even now. Sometimes I liked to close my eyes and pretend she was still beside me. Sometimes I even convinced myself I could hear her voice on the wind. I sat myself down and watched Helen soaking in the scenery with a smile on her face.

“Wow,” she said, and took a few steps along the brook, turning on the spot over and over, taking in the whole vista. “Mr Roberts, this is beautiful… really beautiful…”

“I thought you’d like it.”

“…it’s like something from a novel… something secret and wild… and magical…” She ran her fingers over the bark of my favourite old oak tree. “Yes… magical… that’s it… this place is so alive…”

“Yes, it is.” I took out a cigarette, cupped my hand against the breeze to light it.

“Is it yours?” she asked. “Is this your place?”

“Technically not, no.” I beckoned her closer, until she was at my side, then patted Anna’s space with a lurch in my stomach. Helen took a tentative seat, and she was close, just like Anna would have been. I pointed to the brow of the hill opposite, through the trees, where you could just make out the corner of my studio jutting from the foliage. “That’s my place, but I’ve been coming here ever since I moved in, and nobody’s ever argued it.”

“Then it’s a secret.” Her eyes were smiling. “A secret place.”

“This place has heard a lot of my secrets.”

“And you’ve heard a lot of mine…” She looked away, and there was that little bloom of her cheeks again. A delicate shyness that only stoked the flames. “Maybe one day I’ll hear some of yours, now that we’re… friends… maybe… I guess we’re friends, right? Are we really friends, Mr Roberts?”

Brave, brave little Helen Palmer. Even in the face of her nerves she had spirit. I was coming to love her little outpourings, the beauty in her sweet little confessions. Her eyes were brimming with reverence, and it made me feel good, made me feel wanted, made me feel like a man again.

“You don’t know me, Helen. If you did, then maybe you wouldn’t be so keen to be friends,” I laughed to lighten my words. “Maybe I’d bore you. Maybe you’d find my ways to your distaste.”

“I would still want to know you,” she said, unfazed. “Maybe I don’t know things about you, not in the way I know Lizzie, or Katie, or my mum and dad, but there is more to knowing someone than that.”

I felt chastised, and it amused me. “What makes you so confident you want a man like me?” I shocked myself with my choice of words, and Helen’s eyes widened. “To be friends with a man like me,” I corrected, but it was too late. The corner of Helen’s lip was pinched between her teeth, the expression of concentration I knew so well from class. Her gaze drifted towards my cottage as she formulated her response.

“It’s more than knowing
things
,” she said. “Do you believe in the soul?”

“In a form, yes, I think so. Do you?” I offered her my cigarette and she took it from my fingers like a hummingbird. I barely felt her touch.

I watched her take a breath, and the light breeze curled the smoke from her mouth to mine. I breathed it in, tasted it.

“Yes,” she said. “I believe in the soul. Not in a churchy way or anything like that, I just… I feel things… moods… people… not in my mind, but deeper, in my heart, or sometimes my stomach…” She took another drag. “I feel things, and I see things, and through them I feel like I know them… things that I paint… things that I sense…” She handed back my cigarette and watched me place it between my lips. “I guess I’m not making
any
sense.”

“On the contrary,” I said. “You’re making sense. Perfect
abstract
sense. You’re talking about intuition, and instinct, and that ethereal perception of the world us artists are often blessed with.” I smiled. “Or cursed. It depends how you look at it.”

“Blessed,” she said. “Art is a blessing.”

“Art, yes, but emotional sensitivity, the quest for the intangible, the meaning in everything, the beauty in everything. That can sometimes be a curse.” I stubbed out my cigarette in the dip of rock I always used as an ashtray. “It can be a lonely path.”

She pushed her hair behind her ears and nodded. “Yes… it can.”

“So, tell me, intuitive one, what does your soul say about a man like me?”

Her heels tapped against the rock, a steady rhythm as she pondered. “You’re smart,” she said. “And you’re considered. I see you thinking… when you’re thinking your eyebrows tense up, just a little. You think before you speak, most of the time, anyway. You take this little pause before you answer a question, like you want to be sure. A little breath, and you often tilt your head.”

“I didn’t know I tensed my eyebrows, or tilted my head.”

“You do. Not weirdly or anything, just a bit.” She laughed, a delightful girly sound. “I do this with everyone, don’t worry. I notice everyone.”

“What else have you noticed?”

“Your patience. You are calm, and kind, even when people aren’t listening, even when you’re angry, you’re still calm. You still have time for people, even the idiots. I feel your frustration sometimes, but you don’t show it, you’re always calm. You always want the best for people, even when they don’t want it for themselves, don’t you? Is that why you became a teacher?”

“Partly.” The wind caught her hair and blew it around my shoulder, and again I caught the scent of apple shampoo. “I’m not always calm and patient, Helen. Just at school. It’s my job to be calm and patient.”

She shook her head. “No,” she said. “I don’t believe you. You’re just trying to put yourself down so I don’t think you’re so great anymore.”

I smiled. “Is that so?”

She nodded. “It won’t work, though. My heart knows otherwise.”

“Your heart knows me that well, does it?” And mine sped up, a ridiculous reaction to a young girl’s observations.

“Well, my heart, my soul, whatever you want to call it.” Her eyes fixed on mine, and beneath the nerves there was steadfast honesty. “Sometimes I see you’re sad, like I get sad. Sometimes I see you watching the rain through the window, when everyone’s busy around you, and you act like it’s nothing, but I feel it… something… it tickles my stomach… makes it lurch like I’m falling… like it does when I feel sad, too.”

And my stomach lurched. “Everyone gets sad at some point.”

“Maybe.” She didn’t take her eyes away. “Maybe it’s just my imagination.”

“Maybe you’ve got a little too much intuition for your own good.” I tapped the side of her head with my finger. “You should put
this
to better use, you’ve got more important things to be worrying about than my sadness.”